Lights, camera, action: More Joyous trots on set

Plans for More Joyous: The Movie are thundering along, I'm delighted to say. Last week I cast Geoffrey Rush as good ol' Singo, Jackie Weaver as the lovely Gai Waterhouse and - a very well received idea - the beguiling Miranda Kerr as little Tom ''Luscious Lips''.

I'm now hoping our very own Baz Luhrmann will direct, fresh from his latest screen triumph The Great Gatsby. In a review this week, The New Yorker film critic David Denby dissed Baz as ''less a filmmaker than a music video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste''. Fabulous. Exactly what we need.

Truth is stranger and more entertaining than fiction: The John Singleton and Gai Waterhouse drama. Photo: Vince Caligiuri

The script is writing itself. In Gai's words, Singo is a foul-mouthed old drunk. He says she's stroppy. She thinks the whole ghastly affair was ''Chinese whispers … a conversation between a trumped-up little jockey, a brothel owner and a football player''. Much aggrieved, Singo rounds on the football player - his mate the ''Immortal'' Andrew Johns - and cries: ''Geez! How can you be so strong on the field and so weak off it?''

Meanwhile, the said jockey, Allan Robinson, has hired a lawyer, the ex-punter Chris Murphy, who is also a dab hand at the one-line scorcher. Gai, he charges, is a snob and ''a failed actress who married a perjurer''.

"An albatross around the neck of the party": Alex Hawke's verdict on the paid parental leave scheme. Photo: Steve Lunam

So casting continues. I'm looking at Hugh Jackman for Joey Johns (although we might have to stand him in a pit for the crowd scenes.) Richard Roxburgh would do Murphy brilliantly, with that incomparable duo of Sam Neill as the spivvy knock-shop proprietor Eddie Hayson and Bryan Brown as the chief steward, Ray ''the Hat'' Murrihy. Casting Robinson is tricky, but I'm thinking of the Melbourne Cup winner Damien Oliver, who's now out of the saddle after another, unrelated, betting scandal. Not that I want you to think that racing is crook in any way.

As for More Joyous herself, if she's not available I'm sure Gai's husband Robbie could find a suitable ring-in. A bit of paint splashed around the fetlocks and no one would know the difference.

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But I am also attracted to a wonderful suggestion doing the rounds on Twitter: Ray Hadley to play the horse! Sheer comic genius.

Nostrils flared, loving the smell of napalm in the morning, the Tory lunar right braces itself for victory this September. Its first trophy will be Tony Abbott's paid parental leave scheme.

Leading the charge against this wicked socialist pipedream is Melbourne's Institute for Public Affairs, which calls itself an ''independent think tank'' but is, in fact, a paid megaphone for the top end of Collins Street and the likes of Gina Rinehart. The institute's senior fellows and adjunct fellows, its emeritus this and directors of that - they do love a faux academic title - loathe this policy with a passion. To them it is social engineering red in tooth and claw, inexplicable folly from a Liberal leader. Even if women of ''calibre'', as Abbott clumsily put it, would get the biggest bags of money.

Abbott's schmoozing at the institute's annual dinner last month was evidently to no avail. This week the fellows turned on him. They very publicly produced a tract churned out by one Alex Hawke, the backbench MP for Mitchell in Sydney's Hillsong north-west and a notoriously pushy young ideologue on the NSW Liberals' moonbat right. Hawke went for it. ''Now would be a very good time to revisit this policy with a view to scrapping it before the next election, so we can go to the election without this albatross around the neck of the party,'' he wrote.

After that, it just got worse. On Wednesday, Phillip Coorey in the Financial Review revealed that the Parliamentary Budget Office was putting the cost of the program at more than $5 billion a year. Horrified, the business lobby took a flying leap aboard the bandwagon, blowing up about the swingeing tax impost. So did the usual gaggle of chattering economists and the Tory claque at News Ltd.

And that was that. Abbott's paymasters have spoken. To save face when they get to government, he and Joe Hockey will pull the traditional stunt of discovering that Labor has left a budget black hole far worse than even they had expected, blah blah. The policy will then be shoved off to the never-never. This is the gang that invented the non-core promise.

To them it is social engineering red in tooth and claw, inexplicable folly from a Liberal leader.

Another prime target for the nutters is the ABC. It was ever thus, of course, but with the election drawing near, the self-styled conservative culture warriors are working themselves into a high old lather again. Not a day goes by without one of these nongs calling for the nest of Marxist latte-sippers at inner-city Ultimo to be put to fire and sword.

They see this as unfinished business. The Howard government blatantly stacked the ABC board with such Tory stooges as The Australian's resident scold Janet Albrechtsen and the Melbourne Liberal grandee Michael Kroger - now there's a pair for you - but nothing came of it. And many in the Coalition have not forgiven the former ABC managing director Donald McDonald, who was also supposed to go in and blow up the joint at Howard's behest. McDonald actually did his job even-handedly, with great distinction, infuriating many of his erstwhile friends.

The lead in this latest push is shared by the IPA and Melbourne's village idiot and columnist for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt, who howl for the ABC to be broken up and sold off. This is deeply stupid. To give just one simple example: who would buy the ABC's network of country radio stations? They're a vibrant part of their communities, especially at flood or bushfire time, but they could never turn a profit. Most commercial stations in the bush are struggling as it is.

None of this troubles Bolt and his goons. ''The ABC and SBS networks … must simply be eliminated. This will remove the largest mass propaganda machine from the Communists,'' frothed a reader comment on his blog this week. That was one of the milder efforts at what I think of as Fruitcake HQ.

I suspect the culture warriors know, deep down, that they can't flog the ABC. There would be national outrage if they tried. But they will lunge to bring the place to heel with punitive funding cuts. Just watch them.